Mageia forum

First off: Thanks to all the developers & contributors: I'm blown away by this distro.
My comments below might be of interest to other multi-distro junkies, hence the partitions mention in the Topic.
For the rest: I use Mageia because IMO (no one ever accused me of being humble) cooledit is the best X test editor available and yours is the only distro that includes a flawless install of it. I also paid for and use ux (UltraEdit) where I can't use cooledit.

I downloaded this off distrowatch over the weekend & installed it on sdc25 of the largest of the 3 drives I run 31 different distros on.
From the DVD boot I chose install. Naturally it took a while to catalog all those 53 partitions. But I chose one changed the Label to "Mageia" as / & ext4. It also installed nvidia 340.76 on my NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 210]. The US International keyboard setup fine. It correctly suggested that I keep UTC on the system clock & away it went with the install. I went away to do something for a while.
When I came back the computer had rebooted. Since I don't allow my computers to boot from the DVD w/o my intervention I was in my main distro (Bluestar, an Arch Linux derivative, if you're interested). From there I mounted sdc25 to see what I would need to add to my /boot/grub/menu.lst to get it to boot. I mounted the dedicated grub legacy partition I use and made those edits. At the same time I edited the Mageia /etc/fstab to use only one swap partition. Then I rebooted. Mageia came up & warned me that the nvidia driver required 'nokmsboot' on the kernel line then chugged to a halt. Ctrl-Alt-F2 got me to a tty where the root login required no password. I added the 'nokmsboot' to the Mageia kernel line /boot/grub/menu.lst and rebooted.
From then on the install continued nicely. I especially appreciate the advanced option on the user setup to set User & Group IDs. I always set to 1000 & 100 respectively (users group on most distros) and after protesting twice about the less than 1000 group ID it went ahead & did it.
I commend you on having keepassx v2 in your repositories. It nicely handles the .kdbx databases that I had been having to install a ton of mono dependencies for KeePass 2.29 to work on Linux.
To compile tuxcards v2.2.1 I needed 'qmake'. So I installed the 639 packages of 'task-kde4-devel' & then 'gdb' as well. Again all installed flawlessly. I had tried adding 'tainted' repositories to see if it was there. I removed them when I found that it wasn't there.

Again: An excellent distro. Last November I tried to install Mageia 4 on an IBM T61 laptop via a poorly named wireless router-repeater & never succeeded despite excellent and, very patient support on on the forums. I'm home now so I'm using my wired 1 Gigabyte Ethernet card on a 'CPU~Quad core Intel Core i5-3350P (-MCP-)' not the T61. But I may install it on that as well.

I'll go to your suggestions for apps to be included area and put in a pitch of 'vfu 4.16' & 'tuxcards v2.2.1' there.
vfu is just the thing for those of us stuck out at the CLI and not remembering all those command parameters. Much more agile than mc.

First off: Thanks for the extensive feedback.

larrydc wrote:I'll go to your suggestions for apps to be included area and put in a pitch of 'vfu 4.16' & 'tuxcards v2.2.1' there.
vfu is just the thing for those of us stuck out at the CLI and not remembering all those command parameters. Much more agile than mc.

Please report those as a package request, they haven't been reported yet: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_repor ... ge_request

Although in general the problem with adding more packages is simply that we don't have enough contributors to maintain all of them.
Right now we have e.g. ~3700 unmaintained source packages which equates to several thousand binary packages that are not maintained
http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/data/unmaintained.txt

Feel free to check http://www.mageia.org/contribute/ and see if some area is interesting for you if you might want to help out.

Although in general the problem with adding more packages is simply that we don't have enough contributors to maintain all of them.
Right now we have e.g. ~3700 unmaintained source packages which equates to several thousand binary packages that are not maintained
http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/data/unmaintained.txt

Please excuse my denseness but I don't understand. Do you mean that these 3,700 unmaintained packages are available in Mageia but just not the updated versions? Or do you mean that all these packages are won't be available in Mageia until someone steps forward to maintain them?

Feel free to check http://www.mageia.org/contribute/ and see if some area is interesting for you if you might want to help out.

I'll take a look. I am already trying to work with the Debian maintainer of vfu ... only version 4.10 is in Debian & I'm using 4.16.
Or perhaps some documentation work?

Thanks again.

larrydc wrote:Please excuse my denseness but I don't understand. Do you mean that these 3,700 unmaintained packages are available in Mageia but just not the updated versions? Or do you mean that all these packages are won't be available in Mageia until someone steps forward to maintain them?

The former, those packages are still in Mageia, but not maintainted. This means they are rarely updated to new versions, and no bug or security fixes applied.

larrydc wrote:

Feel free to check http://www.mageia.org/contribute/ and see if some area is interesting for you if you might want to help out.

I'll take a look. I am already trying to work with the Debian maintainer of vfu ... only version 4.10 is in Debian & I'm using 4.16.
Or perhaps some documentation work?

Whatever you like better or whatever you're good at.
I'm sure the documentation or QA teams or even packagers appreciate all contributions they get. Or bug triage, translation, artwork or something like that.
If you have further questions don't hesitate to ask.